News

So Xcode 8.2 is just around the corner and there's something you need to pay attention to if you're still writing Swift 2.3 code. Xcode 8.2 will be the last release to support any Swift 2.x compilation. If you haven't converted to 3.0 yet, it's really time to get it wrapped up.

Finally! This has been a pain since the very first day that IAPs launched, way back in 2009 with iPhone OS 3. You'll no longer have to code in secret back doors to allow the press and others to access features that were behind an IAP. The promo codes support all kinds purchases, including renewable subscriptions which is great news!

Tools

Were you inspired by last week's post about server side Swift? Maybe you've been hacking at a Vapor project locally? What happens when you want to get it hosted though? Brent Schooley gives us a guide on how to get apps up and running on Heroku.

Josh Smith with a new command line tool which takes a JSON file and spits out a Swift 3 model class. It's probably not something you'll use every day, but it'll save you plenty of time on the occasions that you do need it!

Code

Long table views with multiple sections, each displaying something different always have the potential to ruin your dreams of avoiding Massive View Controllers. To help you keep things under control, Ricardo Pramana Suranta has put together this library for delegating out the work to smaller classes with much clearer responsibilities. Worth a look if you deal with this situation often.

Padraig O Cinneide on finding and fixing obscure crashes. There's been plenty posts like this, but every time one is published I learn something new. There's tips here on how to find all of your crash reports and some great information on what you can, and can't do in background completion blocks.

Loïc Lecrenier with a new Markdown parser, written in pure Swift 3. There's already Swift compatible markdown parsers built on top of the CommonMark C reference implementation. It's always good to have alternatives though, especially with no dependencies.

Business and Marketing

Allen Pike on the age old problem of which clients to take work from, and which will be more trouble than they're worth. This was my least favourite bit of client development when I did that. Good advice in here though, especially on NDAs.

It's been a while since the battle for the App Store sales aggregators was lost to the online services where you pay for the software by contributing your data. However, if you're not happy doing that you might want to check out this new app by Kyle Hankinson (who also writes the SQLPro apps). Oh and it's open source too!

macOS Development

So everyone has been digging into NSTouchBar and it's pretty clear that this is a very capable API which has had significant thought and effort invested in it. In this article Jake Marsh gives us a nice guide on how to get started.

Videos

Not sure how I missed these when they came out a few months ago, but I'm fixing it right now. Here's all of the videos from the Layers conference which has been running alongside WWDC for the last couple of years. There's some great design focused talks here.